大象传媒

The Anderson Shelter

Towards the end of August 1939 a Plymouth Corporation lorry came along making deliveries at every house both sides of the street. Each delivery consisted of a number of heavy, shining corrugated steel sheets, some straight, others curved at one end, together with steel angle irons and channel bars plus a bag of heavy duty nuts, bolts and washers, plus an open-ended spanner to fit. Thus was the Anderson air raid shelter introduced to the citizens, complete with a sheet of instructions on how and where to install it.

There were people who did not wish to take delivery of this free gift; some thought that the shelter couldn't possibly be protection against the kind of thing that had been dropped on places like Guernica, in Spain and Warsaw in Poland; others did not have anyone to do the digging and installation, yet others did not have any intention of spoiling the appearance of their back gardens. Most house owners came round eventually to acceptance of the situation and I don't believe many houses in Julian Street were left without an air raid shelter of some sort, the optional ones being Morrisons (under - the - table type) or brick-built shelters.

At No. 31 Julian Street my father, having experienced the Great War in France and Belgium, was well aware of the widespread damage which resulted from the use of high explosive devices and he set the family busy with the right tools to dig down into the back yard to a depth of three feet. I think he must have borrowed the pick and shovel because our back yard was concreted all over except for a narrow, brick-built border filled with earth. We would only have had small gardening hand tools. If put together at ground level the shelter would measure six feet tall and about five feet wide. The length depended on the number of side pieces bolted together which, in turn, depended on the number of people to be accommodated - in our case five.

Father wanted a shelter deep enough to step down into; a compromise depth of two feet six inches was finally deemed to be acceptable, thereby reducing the height above ground level to three feet six and the length was about six feet. A spirit level was brought into play and the channel bars formed a good foundation for the sides. It did not take long to erect the shelter with its back exit up against the brick wall which separated our back yard from No 29's. The plan was that if the front entrance became blocked in a raid the top half of the rear exit could be unbolted from inside the shelter and the brick wall then attacked with hammer, chisel and crowbar - these tools having been designated by Dad as part of the shelter's equipment.

After the rapid fall of France, the Home Guard (formerly the Local Defence Volunteers) were placed in locations thought to be targets in the event of a German invasion. The road bridges over each end of the railway cutting, suddenly being considered as "strategic", were protected by armed sentries - night and day, to start with. Knowing that the sentries involved were gathered from the ranks of men who had avoided being called up for military service, or were too old (and hence were probably not too good in the eyesight department), we decided that the railway cutting was not a good place to play in. Or it may have been that our parents decided. Whichever it was, the railway cutting was a place to keep clear of.

Later on, when the probability of an invasion had receded, several passenger coaches unexpectedly arrived on the branch line and were used as accommodation for Italian prisoners of war for several weeks. The POWs wore various items of clothing - of British and Italian origin - with circular patches sewn on for identification purposes, but there was no sign or suspicion that any of the POWs had any great desire to escape from such luxurious captivity. After a while they were even allowed out unescorted to walk the streets of Cattedown in their spare time; their official purpose in life was, I believe, to act as labour forces on farms and other agricultural locations.

Our very first sight of a German bomber happened during a daylight raid when we saw a Heinkel 111 flying towards us as we looked out of the shelter's entrance; it seemed to drop low out of a cloudbank and into a patch of clear sky and was (we surmised) following the path of the railway track. The plane was immediately surrounded by black puffs of anti-aircraft fire and, simultaneously, it released a bomb which landed on the post office at the corner of South Milton Street and Cattedown Road, killing the postmaster's wife and, I think, two or three other people.

This clear demonstration of what was likely to come prompted my father to build a blast wall in front of the Anderson shelter but independent of it; this wall measured about two feet thick at the bottom and tapered to about nine inches at the top, where a recess was filled with a few inches of earth and planted with flowers. A horizontal piece of corrugated iron was then used to span the gap between shelter and blast wall; this we covered with a thick layer of earth. The wall stood high enough to stop stones, masonry or shrapnel from coming in the front entrance which we now left open for ease of entry and exit. This was considered more important when the increased use of incendiary bombs made it essential to be able to get out and check the house during pauses in the bombing. Many a house burned down while the families stayed in their shelter or sheltered elsewhere than on the premises.

It was only the work of a minute or two to climb out of the shelter, check for fire back and front, then get back in again - the back and front doors of the house were left open for this purpose during the lengthy air raids. We only had one steel helmet between us - Dad's Home Guard issue. When checking for incendiaries the only danger was from anti-aircraft shrapnel which rained down long after the incendiary and high explosive bombs had landed. We seldom needed torches out of doors because either the moon was pretty well full strength ( a "bombers' moon", as in the film "Dangerous Moonlight", but without the "Warsaw Concerto" being played in the background) or the place was still illuminated by German flares which sometimes hung around for five or six minutes after all the bombs had been dropped.

Mention of my father's Home Guard steel helmet prompts me to explain that his membership of "Dad's Army" was only due to be brought into effect in the event of the German forces arriving in strength. His job then would have been to ferry British forces around from place to place in his Corporation double decker bus. Apart from the steel helmet his only equipment was a pair of shiny black gaiters and a "Home Guard" armband - no uniform clothing.

By now the shelter equipment included a kettle full of water and tea-making necessities; as soon as we heard the siren, the drill was: get dressed - down to the shelter - flash up the stove and put the kettle on. The "stove" was an open-topped circular metal gadget of about four inches diameter and three inches high; methylated spirit was poured in to a depth of about half an inch and ignited with a match through one of a series of ventilator holes around the circumference. The kettle sat on top and enough heat was generated to boil the water in about half an hour plus, of course, warm up the atmosphere in the shelter at the same time. The heater would be left on for the latter purpose because some of the raids lasted five or six hours.

Every morning following a raid it was the custom to go out and pick up the shrapnel, literally by the bucketful. At first the pieces were regarded as souvenirs, but now there was so much that it became part of the "war effort" to pass in the collected metal for recycling. With hindsight, I expect the shrapnel was as much use as the cast iron railings which formerly adorned our front walls. Corporation workmen came along and deliberately smashed the railings before loading the resultant scrap iron into their lorry. Those railings were still piled up at Cattedown Quarry in 1946, never having been taken away or shifted from the spot.

Most of the pieces of shrapnel which littered the streets following an overnight raid had started life as anti-aircraft shells, only a small percentage seemed to have originated as high explosive bombs. Sometimes there would be two or more light raids in one night, separated by the length of time it took the participating aircraft to get as far as Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham or Liverpool and back; it was widely believed by us civilians that aircraft sent to bomb targets other than Plymouth deliberately kept a few bombs for the return leg of the journey. The city doubtless stood out like a sore thumb against the background of the English Channel - especially when parts of it were still on fire from the previous raid - and was a kind of milestone to the German aircrew anxious to drop the rest of their bombs and get back to the other side of the water.

As soon as the "all clear" siren went after a night raid it was usual to get back to bed except when there was any local damage; I well remember that, on a night when Holborn Place, St Johns Road and Brunswick Road took a pasting, several of us hastened along to see whether "School " had been bombed. Guided by the smoke and orange-coloured sky we discovered that It had indeed been totally burned down, although the adjacent Infants' School was not the least bit damaged. The latter had been built fairly shortly before the outbreak of war with a four inch thick flat roof of concrete. Although adjoining the Junior Mixed School building it had survived the incendiaries thanks to that particular feature. I'm not sure whether it still stands today.

On the same night, while the fires were still burning and people stood around in groups talking about the raid, I recall that the local dairyman, after being told which houses had been blown up, offered to drive along in his Vauxhall Twelve-Six Saloon car with a supply of milk for the bombed-out people; this would have been about one-thirty or two o'clock in the morning, such was his generosity and good nature. The police and wardens stopped him from going because of a nearby unexploded bomb ("UXB"); the people involved were being looked after by one of the voluntary services already.

An earlier raid which is still imprinted on my memory resulted in the oil fuel tanks at Turnchapel being set on fire and a number of people being killed. We didn't hear about this until the following day, when a huge live column of smoke remained over the area and the news soon spread. The Germans used the smoke by day and the flames by night to guide their aircraft right into Plymouth to drop more bombs. I remember our chemistry teacher at Emergency High School mentioned that the oil tanks fire, (by then in its third or fourth day), could easily be extinguished by pumping oxygen into the blazing tanks. He then asked us why that remedy could not or would not be applied. Guess which pupil's hand went up to point out (correctly) that it would be too expensive !

(One of the Admiralty fuel tanks at the Thanckes Oil Fuel Depot, Torpoint was also set on fire later in the war and it is said by members of the staff there that even as recently as 1999 a spell of really hot weather could bring sunken oil to the surface of the surrounding ground, even though the tank involved was completely rebuilt, including its concrete wall.)

The shrapnel was dumped at a different location - possibly at sea, where no one could accidentally find it and complain to the Corporation about not re-cycling the stuff. Most of it originated from anti-aircraft shells although often we found bomb nose cones and, of course, hundreds of incendiaries. Yes, hundreds. Those which landed in the streets were harmless enough and simply burned weird shapes into the tarmac of the road surface; only the tail fins survived as recognisable souvenirs because the body of the bomb itself was highly combustible, composed of a magnesium alloy. They, too, soon ceased to be souvenirs as we piled them up; only our school friends who lived outside the city tended to show any interest in them.

The Astor Playing Field was equipped with a barrage balloon, manned by the R.A.F. The balloon was called "Hector" by the Julian Street residents and, during daylight hours, one would hear a loudly shouted chorus of "Hector's going up !", suggesting that the air raid siren would shortly be sounding, with a daylight air raid being imminent. (We always presumed that the R.A.F. balloon people would be told about incoming enemy aircraft before we, the civilians, would; most times this proved to be correct.)

In spite of all the many thousands of anti-aircraft shells sent up from the various gun batteries and ships in Plymouth Sound (notably HMS "Newcastle", which was moored there for a very long time) I only ever actually saw two German aircraft brought down; I must have been in the shelter when any others met their fate. One was during a heavy night raid and it caught fire nicely, last seen heading east towards Plympton - I believe it crashed somewhere in Ivybridge; the other was in daylight and it was losing height rapidly, trailing blue and black smoke as it went out south over the breakwater. Both these events were heartily cheered by those able to witness them, something like a goal being scored at Plymouth Argyle's football ground, but louder and more sustained applause !

As bombing raids began to become more of a threat than at first supposed, and as they increased in severity and frequency, people on the receiving end began to think about getting out as far as possible from the city at night. The roads north and east of Plymouth became more and more popular, with families putting as much distance as possible between them and the next raid. Many made the nightly journey on foot, pushing bicycles or prams laden with their food, extra clothing and so on. Some settled down as comfortably as possible on the western edge of Dartmoor, others sheltered in farm buildings and haystacks in the areas which would, in the fullness of time, become housing estates in post-war Plymouth.

There was no such thing as broadcast weather forecasts and these travellers had to decide for themselves, on a daily basis, whether or not the Germans would be likely to come during the night. In the Cattedown area quite a few families had access to commercial vehicles such as coal lorries, builders' vans and the like; the owners allowed the drivers to take these vehicles home overnight in order to disperse them from their premises. They would be loaded up with people complete with baggage and would set off, picking up other people - sometimes complete strangers - en route to comparative safety. In Julian Street we would gather at the street corners shouting "Yellow Convoy ! ! !" at the top of our voices as they gathered momentum. There were probably some amongst us who also would have preferred to leave the city, but these thoughts were closely guarded secrets.

The End.

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